


Arrested Ontology

by GlitchCritter



Series: persona non grata [6]
Category: Original Work, Porpentine Charity Heartscape Cinematic Universe
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, metaphors for writer's block
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26921494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitchCritter/pseuds/GlitchCritter
Summary: For when all your art is made up of other people's words (a cyberpunk remix).
Series: persona non grata [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1837216
Kudos: 2





	Arrested Ontology

You wake to the slickness of leaking coolant. Your face is coated in it, oily sobs forced from the cracks in your plating. Two weeks without neuroreplenishment serum, two weeks since insurance cut you off and the dealers stopped selling nearby, and every morning is a viscous baptism. You stopped cleaning your charging slab five days ago- a stain the color of crushed caterpillars coats the fiberglass shell. 

Rise. Pretend to say your affirmations. It's a new day.

Metal filings scratch the underside of your feet as you plod towards the kitchen, locating the fruit bowl by muscle memory. The mealy wax of a peach is all you can stomach this early. Chew fifteen times before swallowing. You have established rituals to escape thought, escape sensation. Every moment of the day could be flowed through on muscle memory alone. 

Even so, it is with trepidation you haul yourself onto the operating table and plug into the mainframe. You forgot to turn off the screen, shit-a vid of a figure with a dozen mandibles stretching from their flesh-stripped lips, bare muscle gleaming as they gleefully describe their newest mods. They exude the kind of positivity only wealth provides, voice quickening to a soprano buzz as they show diagrams of the designs. 

All part of the newest fad, of course. Kafka making a comeback, an online obsession with adoring the things 'normies' reject, as if ostracism inherently instills a being with superiority. The endless wasting of the taboo, as it becomes fashionable, then boring, until nothing is left that has the thrill of anathema. You won't be like that.

With a single stiletto-sharp finger, you slice off the top layer of your abdomen, and get to work.

The printers can make anything now. Plant, flesh, metal. Today, you request segmented chitin, controlling the machine's limbs as they dismember and reconnect. Your mind watches, you cannot move. Your body is your creation, and it is both you and not you, a being alien in its mundanity. 

And when you are done? When you stare at your final form, flex a spindly tarsus to test the tension?

It's nearly identical to the figure from the vid. And differences are obvious copies of other vids, other people, you exquisite corpse, you copycat, you are nothing more than lacunae stuffed with someone else's memories.

Dive back in. Tear yourself apart, until there is your mind and there is the carcass that was never you, that you did not give yourself the time to call your own, throw it into the incinerator that powers the printers, a perpetual motion machine. So much empty movement. 

Again.

Plastic doll limbs stitched together with sinew, smiled scrawled on with a crayon. A perfect puppet.

Worthless.

Again.

Limbs made of knives, oozing viscera, no senses but that of touch, so finely tuned you can feel the rumble of ants crawling outside. The ultimate weapon.

You call yourself creative? Idiot.

Again.

Hands and tendrils and dry, black mouths, barren and desperate, made for demanding, made for claiming all that is not you. A true form.

Useless, stupid cow, this has all been done, done a thousand times better by beings infinitely more worthy of recognition. 

Don't even bother with severing the nerves, tear it all apart and feel every moment-that's what you deserve, isn't it? For your dull mind, one you've polluted and willingly fractured for the sake of fleeting pleasure. Didn't you dream of being worth something as a child?

You can't remember.

So you reconstruct your metal skeleton, and leave the printing room looking exactly as you always have. 

Everything smells of ash.


End file.
